Most notably, the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes still wonders about that now-infamous YouTube video…

Despite the centrality of the YouTube video to the administration’s public discussion of Benghazi, it goes virtually unmentioned in the nearly 100 pages of emails between the nation’s top intelligence and Obama administration officials as they reshaped the talking points provided by the CIA. The film trailer is included as part of a list on the first page of the documents and again at the very end, in the subject line about a meeting of high-ranking officials on Saturday morning: “SVTS [Secure Video Teleconferencing System] on Movie Protests/Violence.”

As the top U.S. officials discussed what to include in the talking points that would shape their case to the country on the attacks in Benghazi, the video was absent. Whose idea was it to make it the centerpiece? The Obama administration still has a lot of explaining to do.

Americans are now more satisfied with many issues than they were 13 years ago, but they are significantly less satisfied with the economy and the role the U.S. plays in world affairs. The 40-percentage-point drop in Americans’ satisfaction with the economy, along with a 21-point drop in the world affairs issue, contrasts with gains in satisfaction on issues such as the position of gays and lesbians in society, taxes, the nation’s military strength, and race relations.

“If she wants to hide behind her age she shouldn’t have been rude to me.”– ESPN2′s Keith Olbermann after getting into an online Twitter argument Wednesday with the 13-year-old sister of pro hockey player Tom Sestito [Twitter]

Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Jonathan Capehart, who is black and openly liberal, is a full-on supporter if first lady Michelle Obama wants to get a little Botox.

AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

In the Post, Capehart tells the story of his own mother, now 72, getting a “refresher” for her face:

When I first saw my mom after her “refresher,” I thought she got robbed. An already young-looking woman looked the same. Not so, a couple of weeks later. Upon getting in the back seat of a car on the way to a dinner, I tapped the shoulder of my mother who was in the front passenger seat.

Chin resting on hand (again), she turned and drawled, “Hello!”

“Dayum! You look great!” I exclaimed. “Why thank you,” she said giggling. My hunch is if that Michelle does go this route, we’ll all have a similar reaction.

Obama, celebrating her 50th birthday this weekend, told People magazine recently that she wouldn’t rule out Botox or going under the knife. She added, though, that she didn’t think she would “go that route.”

But what about the people who do and clearly go too far and end up prematurely looking like Joan Rivers with an allergic reaction to shellfish? It happens.

Isn’t Capehart worried Obama might end up looking like a tragic Real White House Wife?

SPEAKER: The president promised that if you like your health plan, you could keep it.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: If you like your plan you can keep it.

SPEAKER: But that’s a lie.

JORGE RAMOS: Thousands of people are getting letters of cancellation from their insurers because allegedly their plans do not meet the requirements that exist under ObamaCare. And others have been told that they have to pay more for the same policies.

SPEAKER: If you are a victim of the lies of the president, click on the ad and share your story at www.GOP.com/comparte

SPEAKER: Paid for by the Republican National Committee, who is responsible for the content of this advertisement.

From a White House pool report filed Thursday by the Detroit Times’s David Shepardson, who is covering Vice President Joe Biden‘s tour of the North American International Auto Show:

Biden sat in several new cars, including the Jeep Cherokee and Chrysler 200. He joking told the press corps to get out of the way because “I am driving it off.”

Biden stopped to look at an engine on display, before he made his way to the Ford Motor stand, where he met Ford executive chairman Bill Ford Jr. and Rep. John Dingell. “Thank you for saving our ass,” Biden told Ford, apparently referring to the 2008-2009 auto crisis, when the Dearborn automaker didn’t seek a government bailout.

In a new interview with Larry King, veteran newsman Dan Rather defends Fox News from critics who say it’s little more than a media operation for the Republican Party.

“Do you ever think the thought that Fox News channel is an actual part of the Republican party?” King asks Rather.

After a pause, Rather says the criticism “goes too far.”

“I’ll say this about [Fox News CEO Roger Ailes]:” Rather says, ”he is a very good businessman, he’s very smart about television, and he built a network when I, for one, wasn’t at all sure he could do so. And has he used it to benefit the Republican Party, yes. The record is very clear on that. But is it a sole operative and propaganda machine for the party? I’d have to stop short of that.” (more…)

Below is an early sampling of your responses, which ranged from the wicked to the wonky. Be sure to check out Reynolds’ new book, “The New School” (review here), and if you’d like to join the conversation and potentially snag a free copy of “The New School,” follow @TheBlazeBooks and see below:

ICYMI: Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates dropped by Comedy Central last night to chat with “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart. Adding to his critiques of the Obama administration and its management of wars abroad, Gates also unloaded on Congress for “micromanaging” the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“One of the things I discovered — and this may have application in other areas — is that when the government tries to build something really big and really complicated especially in the technical world, it almost always fails,” Gates said. “This is not new.”

The latest issue of Time magazine heralds the headline “Can anyone stop Hillary?” Also featured on the cover is a photo of what looks like former State Secretary Hillary Clinton‘s pants hem and the pointy heel of a shoe with a person dangling off the edge.

In Hillary Clinton, the United States of America is now experiencing a rare, if not unprecedented, political phenomenon; she requires a new lexicon. Clinton is so globally famous, so politically wired and so primed for the presidency after two campaigns at her husband’s side and one epic race of her own that her life as a private citizen has become virtually indistinguishable from her life as a candidate.

Clinton has not decided whether to run for President because to do so would only slow her down. …

With Obamacare more unpopular than ever and midterm elections on the horizon, you’d think the GOP would be eager to push a “repeal & replace” health care agenda. But Red State’s Erick Erickson notes that many of the most influential Republicans in Washington seem to be backing away from plans for repeal:

In “The Dao of Capital,” a 2013 book we will be covering in the coming days, hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel, founder of Universa Capital, and former partner of popular author and investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb (he of black swans) explains how he became an acolyte of the Austrian school of economics (links added by Blaze Books):

“It started in a fortuitous economics course at Georgetown University taught by Professor George Viksnins (“Uncle George”). It is most fitting to gain the greatest insight about markets from those who fled antimarket regimes, in his case in Latvia. Uncle George’s declared favorite economist was Joseph Schumpeter, a wavering Austrian, to be sure, but close enough to pique my interest. And from there I discovered a book by Henry Hazlitt titled Economics in One Lesson–and if I am able to get my children to read only one economics text in their lifetime, God forbid, it would be Hazlitt’s. (In addition to the Austrian tradition’s absence from most of the top universities, it should come as no surprise that, according to my diligent research, even Austrian-friendly texts are absent from virtually all the top preparatory schools in the United States–but for one, my favorite: Cranbrook Kingswood in Michigan, where Hazlitt’s book is required reading. Economics in One Lesson is an expansion on the essay, “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen,” by nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat (who plays a leading role in chapter 4 of this book).

It is most fitting to gain the greatest insight about markets from those who fled antimarket regimes

Share:

Hazlitt’s proclamation would become a central tenet for me (wherein I would equivalently swap the words “economics” with “investing” and “act or policy” with “capital and production process”): “The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence (more…)

Egypt’s new constitution was overwhelmingly approved in a referendum, state media reported on Thursday, an expected victory that nudges army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ever closer to a bid for the presidency.

The vote advances a transition plan the army-backed government unveiled after deposing Islamist president Mohamed Mursi last July following mass protests against his rule.

The next step is expected to be a presidential election for which Sisi – wildly popular among his supporters – appears the only serious candidate. He has yet to declare he will run.

Some 90 percent of the people who voted approved the constitution, state-run media reported. Al-Ahram, the state’s flagship newspaper, said the constitution was approved by an “unprecedented majority”, citing early results.

The constitution won wide support among the many Egyptians who backed the army’s removal of Mursi. The Muslim Brotherhood had called for a boycott, saying the vote is part of a coup that deposed an elected leader and revived a brutal police state.

Last night Professor Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit), author of the newly released book, “The New School” joined Glenn Beck to discuss the bubble in higher education and some alternatives that might emerge in the wake of its implosion, including certification, apprenticeships and other means of accreditation.

The miscellaneous blog Futility Closet dug back into the archives of the New York Times to find this oddity: Between Feb. 7, 1898 and Jan. 1, 2000, the issue number of the front page of the paper was off by 500.

On Feb. 6, 1898, it seems, someone preparing the next day’s front page tried to add 1 to the issue number in the upper left corner (14,499) and came up with 15,000. Apparently no one noticed, because the 500-issue error persisted until yesterday (No. 51,753). Today The Times turns back the clock to correct the sequence: this issue is No. 51,254.

Thus an article on March 14, 1995, celebrating the arrival of No. 50,000 was 500 days premature. It should have appeared on July 26, 1996.

The misnumbering was spotted by a diligent news assistant: “He wondered about the potential for self-perpetuating error. Using a spreadsheet program, he calculated the number of days since The Times’s founding, on Sept. 18, 1851. … Finally, by scanning books of historic front pages and reels of microfilm, Mr. Donovan zeroed in on the date of the 500-issue gap.”